Before reading this interesting and potentially life changing blog, it would be a good idea to watch the following short videos at the links provided below; and read the article, third link below, as a prerequisite if one does not understand the double slit experiment or basic quantum physics. Marrying Quantum Mechanics, the Human Brain, Consciousness and the Holographic Universe

Dr. Granville Dharmawardena of the University of Colombo writes that psychologists often speak of the mind and the body as two separate entities for convenience, but most acknowledge that they are intimately entwined. Yet none knows exactly how or how intimately. So the mind body problem keeps stubbornly resisting a definite solution. Philosopher John Searle (Mills Professor of Philosophy, University of California , and Berkley ) says that today’s philosophers are reluctant to tackle such big problems as how people have been trying to understand their relationship to the universe.

All these refer to the elusive relationship between the body and the mind referred to more generally as the brain-mind problem. The brain-mind relationship has baffled mankind for a very long time. One main reason for this is that it was not considered as a candidate for scientific study until recently.

Psychology and related sciences were able to continue for many years by either ignoring the brain entirely or at best treating it as a black box whose rules of operation could be understood without reference to its internal contents or composition.

The human brain without a doubt is the most complex organ in the known universe. It is physical and biological. Therefore, it has to be amenable to scientific probing without the intervention of such considerations as the Gödel’s theorem, which states that there are statements in mathematical systems which are true but cannot be proven within those systems.

Consciousness on the other hand is neither physical nor biological. Therefore, it is a more elusive subject to deal with and Gödel’s considerations may have a role to play there. Unfortunately, Attempts to understand brain and consciousness have been mostly based on restrictive Newtonian classical science and exclusively the illusionary material realm composed of matter that we live in.

Although the powers of understanding of human senses and the scope of Newtonian science are limited to three spatial dimensions, the scope of our universe is not limited to three dimensions. In fact, news theories hypothesize there are eleven dimensions. Many of the natural phenomena happening within our universe transcend the three dimension scene. Therefore, it is not possible to assume that the mechanisms of operation of the brain and consciousness remain imprisoned within the confines of Isaac Newton’s three dimensional material universe. Just as the Earth was proved not to be the center of the universe, our current theories that govern our physical universe such as Einstein’s gravity theory and others may become obsolete in our understanding of reality.

Attempts to understand the brain-mind problem within Newton ‘s universe over centuries have introduced divisions and concepts that have become detrimental to having a new look at it from the point of view of modern science, more specifically quantum mechanics. . Just as the Earth was proved not to be the center of the universe, our current theories that govern our physical universe such as Einstein’s gravity theory and others may become obsolete in our understanding of reality. For example, astrophysicist can only account for about 10% of the matter in the universe. Dark matter was invented to account for the other 90%, but no one knows if dark matter even exists. Could it be that our theories are really 90% wrong, dark matter doesn’t exist, and there are actually other things that are beyond our current comprehensive ability that determine our perception of our universe and reality? Most likely, yes.

In trying to interpret the mechanisms of operation of the human brain and developing a model for consciousness that explain all practical observations, it is necessary first of all to jettison traditional thinking and clean up the mess created by human genius. It is also necessary to enlist all the observed properties of the brain and consciousness and ensure that the developed model explains all of them.

There is general agreement that the seat of consciousness is the brain in Human beings. We can go along with this concept. Philosopher Colin McGinn (Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University , New Jersey the USA ) introduces a property of the brain of which the brain is the basis of consciousness and a theory which fully explains the dependence of conscious states on brain states. He adds that if we knew the theory, then we have a constructive solution to the mind-body problem.

It is reasonable to consider a property of the brain, but it is not possible at this stage to shut the possibility that, as Nobel Laureate Neurobiologist Sir John Eccles points out, the scope of consciousness may not remain limited within the confines of the human skull. This is especially so because many of our practical observations and those of many others clearly show that consciousness, at times, can remain completely dis-embodied. We can hence, focus our attention on understanding three factors, the nature of consciousness, the property of the brain that enables consciousness to operate within the brain, and a model that explains the behavior of the brain and consciousness as practically observed.

The brain, which is material, has received much attention over a very long period from both classical and modern scientists. The classical science explanation of the structure and the mechanisms of operation of the brain is easily accessible through medical and biology text books.

The brain consists of about 1.3 kg. of gray matter which is made up of hundreds of billions of specialized cells known as neurons which have electrical properties akin to those of transistor circuits in computers. Like in transistor circuits these cells are interconnected and there are trillions of such neuron-neuron connections in the brain. Like in transistor circuits electrical signals are transmitted through neurons by unidirectional electrical pulses which are excited, modulated, or inhibited by pulses in other neurons, and passed on to other neurons.

However, there are differences. In transistor circuits electrical pulses are transmitted across the circuits by the migration of electrons at an enormous velocity of half the speed of light, where as in neurons, electrical pulses are transmitted by the movement of ions which are much heavier than electrons, at a much slower maximum speed of 120 meters per second (mps). This speed is not fast enough to account for the speed of human actions. The interneuron links are established through biochemical junctions, through which signals are passed from one neuron to another by the release of ions. In transistor circuits, all connections are exclusively electrical. The brain interprets signals from the senses and creates images in the brain that are the individual’s perception of reality.

For example, when we see an object, our eyes take in light through the lens of the eye and invert the light image onto the back of the eyeball where the light is converted to electrical energy and transmitted to the visual centers of the brain by the optic nerve. If the optic nerve is severed, the image in the visual center of the brain disappears. Also, if the object makes a noise, our sense of hearing picks up the noise from vibrations in air and converts these vibrations into electrical impulses that are transmitted by the cochlear nerves to the brain. If the cochlear nerve is severed, the nerves ceases to transmit to the brain and the person will hear nothing from the object.

The brain is the most complex and most important organ in the human body, and it is a voracious consumer of energy, consuming ten times more energy per unit mass as compared to other body organs. Failure to supply energy to the brain for a few minutes can cause substantial brain damage and ultimate brain death. The variety of different proteins expressed in neurons is about 30,000. This is greater than in any other body organ.

The importance of understanding the structure and mechanisms of operation of the brain prompted President George Bush of the USA to proclaim the 1990’s as the decade of the brain. EEG (Electro Encephelo Graph) was the original technique used to study brain mechanisms. Three new techniques, PET (Positron Emission Tomography), MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and Magneto Encephelography have come into use in studying brain mechanisms during the last decade. As a result, we understand the functioning of the brain much better today than a couple of decades ago.

The slow electrical pulses moving at a maximum speed of 120 mps may, perhaps, be adequate to account for some of the involuntary functions inside the human body. But they are certainly not adequate to account for the speed of human activities that involve computing and the mind. The similarities between the computer circuits and the brain cells have driven brain researchers to construct computer models for the brain. Initially, they tried serial computers, and then to account for the speed, parallel computers came into play. Today, computer models dominate most brain research, but are still no match for the human brain.

However, computer models are many orders of magnitude slower than needed to account for the speed of thought. A Neurologist has calculated that if the brain was a standard serial or a parallel computer, it would take more time than the age of the universe to perform all the necessary calculations associated with just one perceptual event. But if the brain were a quantum computer, it would try out all the various possible combinations of data arrangement at once, and thus, unify its experience. So, in essence, the brain operates very similar to how a quantum computer works.

Many who research on the brain-mind problem proceed with a prior assumption that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but quantum physics indicates that consciousness is related to the awareness that an electron appears to show in the wave/particle duality (double slit experiment). Quantum physicists have shown that the electron behaves differently when being observed by a human.

When the electron is not being observed, the electron behaves like a wave, but when an observing instrument is placed in the experiment, the electron behaves like a particle. This experience indicates that the electron will change its behavior/reality depending on whether or not the electron is being observed as if the electron is aware that it is being observed. This awareness is very similar, if not the same, as human awareness and may be related to the same consciousness.

Some researchers consider consciousness as another property, emerging as a result of trillions of electrical pulses shuttling across the brain. According to this, consciousness is only a property and not an entity. John Searle introduces consciousness as a natural biological phenomenon that does not fit comfortably into either of the traditional categories of mental and physical, caused by lower level micro processors in the brain. However, on the basis of practical observations made by cutting edge scientists, these assumptions have been rejected and now consciousness is regarded as a non-material entity capable of independent eternal existence similar to the electron in the double slit experiment. Hence, consciousness can change reality just by being aware.

Observations on OBE (Out of Body Experience) and NDE (Near Death Experience ) show that while the body is in an anaesthetized or inactive state, consciousness can remain dis-embodied, observe events from outside the body, and later re-localize in the brain. After the body renormalizes, the person can relate what his consciousness observed and heard from an out of body location while the body was inactive. Other experiments have shown that consciousness can leave a dying person, float around observing things and events and later, as Eccles had pointed out, attach itself to an unborn fetus to start a new existence as another individual.

Consciousness is, therefore, a non-material entity capable of independent, eternal existence, and not a property. Consciousness is not emergent, and is eternal similar to the electron. It can remain localized in the human brain and interact with the brain, and thereby, control the activities of the human body. While electrons in the brain behave as particles, these electrons prevent the consciousness from realizing that it is part of a larger whole. When the electrons behave as a wave, the consciousness becomes aware of its existence outside the human mind, which makes OBE and NDE possible.

Whenever the electron wave function collapses, the OBE and NDE ends and the person returns to their physical body and its perception of reality similar to the collapsing of the wave function in the double slit experiment in quantum physics. During the OBE and NDE while the electron is behaving as a wave function, consciousness can leave the brain and go into an independent floating existence outside the human body where it can travel independent of space-time similar to the entangled electron.

This behavior of consciousness is akin to the behavior of an electron in and out of an atom. The electron, which is a quantum entity, can remain localized inside an atom by quantum mechanical interaction with the electromagnetic field around the atomic nucleus, which itself is quantum in nature so long as the energy of the atom’s quantum state it occupies matches the energy possessed by the electron. Whenever the energy of the electron does not match, it has to shift to another matching state. In this case the property that localizes the electron inside the atom, the nature of the electron, and the relevant atomic model are well known in quantum physics. All these are quantum in nature. Let us consider the nature of consciousness, the property of the brain, and a model that satisfactorily solves the brain-mind problem.

Nature of Consciousness

Defining consciousness has been considered as a frightfully difficult problem. Does the word “Consciousness” have one single meaning or does it have two meanings like the words “bank” and “palm”.

Quantum Physicist, Danah Zohar, describes consciousness as something that includes general capacity for awareness and purposive response. By this description, she accepts the above two meanings of the word consciousness. Roger Penrose refers to these as active consciousness and passive consciousness.

When a person is awake, information about his/her surroundings is presented to his/her brain by his/her sense organs. The brain processes and computes millions of bits of information presented to it every second by the sensory organs and presents the processed information to consciousness. At this time, electrons in the brain behave as particles.

Through this process, consciousness remains aware of the surroundings and we say that the person is s-conscious of his/her surroundings. When this link between consciousness and the surroundings is interrupted and consciousness is not able to be aware of events in its surroundings, but is aware of events in a dream state, we say that the person is s-unconsciousness. It has been found that when a stimulus is presented to a sensory organ of an anaesthetized, all brain processes relevant to that stimulus takes place as if he/she is not anesthetized. Physicist and Pharmacologist Susan Greenfield (Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University and Professor of Physics at Gresham College , London ) points out that none has yet pointed to a single event that occurs in awake but not in anaesthetized brain.

Hence, when a person becomes s-unconscious, the property severs the link between consciousness and the brain turning on the electron wave function. During this event, consciousness can dis-embody and observe events in the surroundings directly without the help of sensory organs, keep them in memory and relate what was seen, after consciousness returns to the body and re-established links with the brain. The dis-embodied consciousness possesses visual, auditory, and olfactory senses. While dis-embodied, the consciousness experiences a new perception of reality outside of one’s self, I-ness, or oneness.

When the person then becomes s-conscious, the wave function collapses and the electron instantly changes from a wave to that of a particle preventing the person from being aware of being part of the whole. This gives rise to oneness, I-ness, and self.

It has been shown using such techniques as PET and MRI that the above process of receiving data from a stimulus by a sensory organ, transmitting them to the brain, computing and processing the data, and passing the processed data to consciousness, can be reversed by hypnotizing a person. When a hypnotherapist suggests, for example, that he/she is seeing red light to a hypnotized subject, all above processes take place in the brain as if the subject is actually seeing red light. The consciousness gives the brain a perception of reality that is different from the hypnotherapist’s perception of reality similarly to an observer in the example of general relativity where one observer on Earth watches another travel away at the speed of light. To the traveling observer, his perception of reality is different than the observer watching from Earth, and as a result, his experience of time is different than the observer on Earth.

The ability of a person to describe what his/her consciousness had observed or heard while it is in a dis-embodied state makes us to believe that memory is, at least partly, non-material and unaffected by collapsing the wave function.

Several decades ago, David Bohm pointed out many striking similarities between the behavior of our thought processes and that of some quantum processes. For example, while entertaining a vague train of thought, the act of concentrating on one in order to bring it into better focus, changes the original sequence. Like electrons governed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which are never the same again once they have been looked at or measured, a thought which has been highlighted through attention is different from the vague musing which preceded it. The focused thought has “position” like the particle aspect of an electron’s two sided nature (wave/particle duality), whereas the vague musing has “momentum” like the electron’s wave aspect. We can never experience both simultaneously. This is a characteristic feature of a quantum entity. The electron is a wave or a particle, and the perception of reality by an observer changes with the behavior of the electron and observer awareness.

Quantum systems are essentially unified, and so are our thought processes. David Bohm says, “Thought processes and quantum systems are analogous in that they cannot be analyzed too much in terms of distinct elements, because the intrinsic nature of each element is not a property existing separately from and independently of other elements, but is instead a property that arises partially from its relation with other elements.”

Danah Zohar analyzed the quantum like behavior and concludes that consciousness functions according to the laws of quantum mechanics.

We can conclude that consciousness is a quantum mechanical entity that can have an independent existence. It can localize in the human brain when the electron is in a particle state. This provides the necessary quantum mechanical base conducive for it to interact with and function in the brain. When the state changes to that of a wave, consciousness takes flight and starts floating. It takes away with it at least a part of the contents of the memory. It possesses the ability to acquire visual, auditory and olfactory information in spite of the fact that there are no sense organs associated with it. This information is produced by the consciousness projection of a different reality caused by the change in state of the electron, which one may interpret later as a dream or hallucination that comes from an altered perception of reality.

In most attempts to solve the mind-body problem, it is assumed that computers can be used to simulate or model mental and neuro-biological processes in the brain and this can explain consciousness. Roger Penrose (Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, Oxford University ) points out that quantum mechanics and Gödel’s theorem makes us reject these assumptions concerning a different reality.

John Searle points out that a brain made of neurons is aware of what it is dealing with, whereas, a computer modeled to simulate some activity of the brain cannot be aware of what is being dealt with inside it. Therefore, using a computer model is like comparing apples to oranges. In most standard brain models, the mind is believed to emerge from trillions of signals shuttling across billions of neurons in the brain. A brain structured on mechanical principles cannot account for the property that can create s-consciousness by interacting with consciousness.

Recent EEG experiments carried out by a team of physicists at Southampton University ( England ) confirms that thought processes are quantum in nature. Here, the effect of measuring right and left brain activity on a left brain task was tested. They found that measuring left brain EEG improves performance whereas measuring right brain EEG disrupts it. In another experiment it has been found that measuring the left brain EEG makes a right hand activity more accurate.

The major stumbling block in solving the brain-mind problem is how does the brain-mind bind together millions of dissimilar neuron activities into an experience of a perceptual whole. How does the “I” or “self” or the perceived wholeness of one’s world emerge from a system consisting of so many parts, billions of neurons. What creates the “Oneness” of thought processes? What creates individuality and I-ness or “self”? What creates feelings, free will, and creativity? The eternal consciousness.

No mechanistic system consisting of separate interacting parts could give rise to the above. What are the structures in the brain that create the property which grant us access to the quantum realm? This is a good question and once this is known by all mankind, mankind will change.

It has become clear that to explain this theory, one has to consider the most highly ordered and highly unified structures possible in the universe. The structure that possesses both characters, the most highly ordered and most highly unified is the Bose-Einstein condensate.

In classical science, the most ordered structure that we can find is the Crystal.

Crystals are rigid, immovable structures. In Bose-Einstein condensates, the quantum properties allow both a “fluid” order and a high degree of unity. Each particle in a Bose-Einstein condensate fills all the space and all the time in whatever container that holds the condensate. Many of their characteristics are correlated. They behave holistically as one. The condensate acts as one single particle. There is no “noise” or interference between separate parts. This is why super fluids and super conductors have their special frictionless qualities and lasers become so coherent. Super conductors, super fluids, and lasers are Bose-Einstein condensates. The photons of a laser beam overlap their boundaries and behave as one single photon and the whole system can be described by a single equation. Hence, the part always includes the whole like in fractal geometry.

Super conductors, super fluids, and lasers are either very low temperature or very high energy systems. Super conductors and super fluids loose their quantum coherence long before they reach room temperature. Quantum coherence at body temperature in body cells was found by Herbert Frolich. Prior to that, quantum physicist Fritz Popp discovered that biological tissue emits a weak glow when stimulated at the right energy levels.

Cell walls of biological tissue contain countless proteins and fat molecules which are electrical dipoles. When a cell is at rest, these dipoles are out of phase and arrange themselves in a haphazard way. But when they are stimulated they begin to oscillate or jiggle intensely and broadcast a tiny microwave signal. Frolich found that when the energy flowing through the cell reaches a certain critical level, all the cell wall molecular dipoles line up and come into phase. They oscillate in unison as though they are suddenly coordinated. This emergent quantum field is a Bose-Einstein condensate and has holistic properties common to any quantum field. Consciousness works in a similar matter.

Dana Zohar points out that ion channel oscillations in neurons are quantum phenomena which generate a Frolich like coherent electric field. There are ion channels (protein molecules) lining the membrane walls of individual neurons, which open or close in response to electrical fluctuations resulting from stimulation. They act like gates to let Sodium, Potassium, and other ions pass through.

They are of a size to be subject to quantum fluctuations and superposition. Each channel, as it oscillates, generates a tiny electric field. When a large number of ion channels (there are 10 million in each neuron) open and close in unison, as they do when stimulated, the whole neuron fires or oscillates and a large scale electric field is generated across the neuron. Certain neurons act as pace makers. When a pacemaker neuron oscillates in response to stimulation, whole bundles of neurons oscillate with it. A finding by a neurobiologist that when a person sees an object, all neurons in the Cerebral Cortex, associated with that perceptual object, oscillates in unison regardless of their location in the brain. These neurons behave similar to entangled electrons.

Danah Zohar suggests that the original ion channel oscillations are quantum phenomena; which, as in Frolich systems, generates a coherent quantum electric field. It is a Bose-Einstein condensate. Existence of such large scale coherent electrical fields across the brain explains how a large number of disparate and distant neurons can integrate their information to produce a holistic picture, hologram. The quantum entanglement proof that has been developed fairly recently says that non-local (instantaneous or faster than light) quantum correlations exists between particles apparently separated in space and time has helped scientists to understand these effects. Quantum entanglement, also called the quantum non-local connection, is a property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which the quantum states of the constituting objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart–even if the individual objects are spatially separated in a space-like manner.

The crucial distinguishing feature of Bose-Einstein condensate is that many parts which go to make up the ordered system not only behave as a whole, but they become whole. There identities merge and overlap in such a way that they lose their individuality entirely. This is a quantum property. Such a large quantum synchronicity exists in and accounts for the special properties of lasers, super conductors, and super fluids. Only this type of quantum correlated condensed state could explain the unbroken wholeness of the thought process. Consciousness behaves as a fractal. This is similar to a hologram where small fractal parts are identical to the whole part.

The property of the brain which is the non-local quantum correlate or the Bose-Einstein condensate behaves as above. It creates a unity from the diverse bits of information drawing them to a meaningful whole. The millions of sensory data from sense organs received every moment are channeled to various disparate areas of the brain and processed by the computing facility of the brain. Consciousness receives this processed information and creates a holistic scene, hologram. It is this integration of all the processed bits of information to create a one whole that creates the identity as a person, the self or the I-ness. Here is the coherent non-local quantum correlation of the brain and it is an emergent property.

The Body-Brain and Consciousness Model

From the above considerations, it is possible to propose a three tier model for Body- Brain and consciousness, where the brain is sandwiched between the body and consciousness. Here the brain-body link is mechanical and it is fairly well understood from classical science considerations. Body and brain operate in Einstein’s space-time domain where non-locality is forbidden.

The brain consciousness link is established by the property which links the brain to the quantum domain where nonlocality can operate. As previously discussed, non-locality is a direct influence of one object on another distant object, and the distant object can be so far away that it would be impossible for influence to take place according to Newtonian theories. This indicates that non-locality is independent of space-time.

Consciousness is a non-material entity in the quantum domain that is capable of independent existence. Consciousness can remain localized in the brain so long as the emergent quantum particle state doe not change, just as an electron which is a quantum entity can remain localized in an atom so long as the energy of the electron matches the quantum state it occupies.

Now this gets very interesting. Whenever the property breaks down, the mathematical function that governs the behavior of quantum particles changes, i.e. the electrons changes its behavior from that of a particle to a wave function. When this happens in the brain, consciousness can leave the brain and take up a floating existence in the way an electron leaves its atom if it acquires excess energy and starts a floating existence as a free electron. Consciousness can return to the brain if the property is re-established and the wave function collapses and the particle function prevails.

Conclusions

This model explains all the observed properties of human consciousness including NDE, OBE and reincarnation. Since all information transfer in a non-local quantum correlation is instantaneous, just like the speed of an electron and light is instantaneous, it explains the speed of human action. It can be extended to explain phenomena such as telepathy and also explains the individual identity, or the I-ness or self.

As the human race becomes aware of their true ability, a realization will set in that the oneness, self, and I-ness associated with greed and capitalism are not compatible with human evolution. This awareness will cause humanity to evolve to a higher level of consciousness; which is beginning to happen in society today, where oneness, self, and I-ness will battle for survival. Oneness, self, and I-ness as well as greed and capitalism in its current form will cease to exist as the population becomes aware as humanity is enlightened. The emerging mankind will work toward the betterment of all and human suffering will cease to exist.

All it will take for this leap in human evolution to occur is mankind to open up their minds, become enlightened and aware of their true potential as a whole in part of the whole. As more become aware of this conscious ability that has no boundaries in space-time just like electrons have no boundaries, mankind will reach a point of awareness that will cause an instantaneous change in humanity comparable to the instantaneous change of an electron from a particle to a wave. Mankind is on the pioneering edge of the greatest evolutionary change revealed to date as most of us are oblivious, unaware, and confused by our desire to understand ourselves.

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In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect’s name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect’s findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect’s findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The “whole in every part” nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect’s discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium’s front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect’s experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate “parts”, but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these “eidolons”, the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be — every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of “All That Is.”

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a “mere stage” beyond which lies “an infinity of further development”.

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat’s brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious “whole in every part” nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram’s theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage–simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word “zebra”, you do not have to clumsily sort backÿ through one gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like “striped”, “horselike”, and “animal native to Africa ” all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross-correlated with every other piece of information–another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature’s supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.

Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image. Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram’s theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram’s belief that our brains mathematically construct “hard” reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called “osmic frequencies“, and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is “there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really “receivers” floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram’s views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual ‘A’ to that of individual ‘B’ at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species’s anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman’s experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual’s consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations “transpersonal experiences“, and in the late 60s he helped found a branch of psychology called “transpersonal psychology” devoted entirely to their study.

Although Grof’s newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic paridigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College , has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain — as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as “reality”.

Even visions and experiences involving “non-ordinary” reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book “Gifts of Unknown Things,” biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then “click” off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if “hard” reality is only a holographic projection.

Perhaps we agree on what is “there” or “not there” because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson’s are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined.

Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram’s holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect’s findings “indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality”. Vanguard notes…

This is one of the most fascinating files we have seen since it seems to offer a hypothesis which “synthesizes” a multitude of phenomena including that generally classed as “paranormal.” Related files on KeelyNet are the complete MIND series and VEDA1. _

On January 15, 2009, it was reported in New Scientist that some yet unidentified noise that was present in the GEO 600 detector measurements might be because the instrument is sensitive to extremely small quantum fluctuations of space-time affecting the positions of parts of the detector. [3] This claim was made by Craig Hogan , a scientist from Fermilab, on the basis of his own theory of how such fluctuations should occur motivated by the holographic principle. [4]

The New Scientist story states that Hogan sent his prediction of “holographic noise” to the GEO 600 collaboration in June 2008, and subsequently received a plot of the excess noise which “looked exactly the same as my prediction”. However, Hogan knew before that time that the experiment was finding excess noise. Hogan’s article published in Physical Review D in May 2008 states: “The approximate agreement of predicted holographic noise with otherwise unexplained noise in GEO 600 motivates further study.” [5] Hogan cites a 2007 talk from the GEO 600 collaboration which already mentions “mid-band ‘mystery’ noise”, and where the noise spectra are plotted. [6] A similar remark was made (“In the region between 100 Hz and 500 Hz a discrepancy between the uncorrelated sum of all noise projections and the actual observed sensitivity is found.”) in a GEO 600 paper submitted in October 2007 and published in May 2008. [7]

It is also a very common occurrence for gravitational wave detectors to find excess noise that is subsequently eliminated. According to Karsten Danzmann, the GEO 600 principal investigator, “The daily business of improving the sensitivity of these experiments always throws up some excess noise (…). We work to identify its cause, get rid of it and tackle the next source of excess noise.” [3] Additionally, some new estimates of the level of holographic noise in interferometry show that it must be much smaller in magnitude than was claimed by Hogan. [8]